cardinal newman, universities, the goods of the thinking

i have recently begun reading john henry newman's "the idea of a university." i was surprised to find that newman draws a sharp distinction between "academies" and "universities." the former exists to promote the advancement and discovery of knowledge, while the latter exists to teach knowledge to students. in his preface, newman suggests that those who make discoveries and advance knowledge are not necessarily good teachers, and vice-versa. he also argues that advancing knowledge is a characteristically private enterprise, the work of the lone scholars in their respective studies. he notes (thankfully) Socrates as a potential exception.

there is certainly something to newman's distinction between advancing knowledge and teaching knowledge. it is certainly an academic commonplace that professors famous for "advancing knowledge" in some area turn out to be poor teachers. at the same time, however, i find myself wanting to resist making too sharp a distinction between these two kinds of activities. isn't there a way in which teaching characteristically -and not only occasionally- helps the teacher to learn, and perhaps to learn in a way that she couldn't otherwise? i suppose this depends a lot on the difference in capability between teacher and student. a prof might learn quite a bit from her grad students, but a grade school teacher probably doesn't learn much about spelling from her students...

its interesting to note that the terminology seems to have shifted from newman's time to our own (or, at least, in making the trip across the atlantic). we now think of a university as a place that focuses on the advancment of knowledge, in contrast with a "college", which focuses on teaching undergrads. and it is, of course, a very popular thing these days for colleges to remake themselves into universities, even if this change seems to be mostly in name. why is this, we might well ask? certainly it is connected to some sense that being a "real" place of learning inolves producing scholarship -i.e. generating experiments, articles, books.

there is, i think, a kind of madness that accompanies the contemporary academies obsession with the "production" of knowledge. it is not clear who is benefiting, or if there is any benefit at all, from the flood of articles that comes out month after month. what's more, it seems clear that the pressure to produce results in a lot of rushed, and therefore shallow, thinking, as evidenced by the tons of low-quality articles that are constantly appearing in print. what, then, is the impetus behind this rush to "advance" knowledge? perhaps it is the desire to have something tangible to hold onto, to show for all our efforts (including our fund-raising efforts). if there is an article in hand, then we can be sure that we've done something, that we've made progress. and then we can be sure that this whole enterprise was worthwhile, that is was good. perhaps behind this is a picture of learning as another form of production -just as we produce goods and the more goods the better (more cell phones, more cars, more dvds, etc), so we produce academic "goods", and the more we can produce the better the good of learning.

but there is another conception of learning -or at least humanistic learning- in which progress can't be displayed by pointing to an article, precisely because one never actually makes "progress." the enterprise of learning isn't worthwhile or good because it results in something; rather, learning (perhaps we should say contemplation) holds it good within itself. on this view of the matter, we never get "beyond" the man sitting beneath a tree and thinking hard about why there is anything at all. that man already has, so to speak, the good which there is to be had from thinking, and no amount of published articles will give him a better good from thinking. which is not to forget, of course, but is exactly to remember, that there are many goods which cannot be gotten just by thinking.